Slice of Life Writing Challenge: My Hot Tub Story

Preamble: This entry was inspired by Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres at the great Two Writing Teachers blog, where they issue an annual slice-of-life writing challenge. Essentially, to write every day through the month of March. I did not participate formally, but I like the concept — especially for anyone who attempts the near-impossible, i.e., to teach writing. Bless you all.

It was my fourth hotel in little more than a week, I’d attended a literacy conference in Dublin, OH, flown into Philadelphia, and now worked my way north in a rented Kia through New Jersey on my own, personal traveling dog-and-pony show.

I was both pony and dog, whinny and woof.

It’s true there is no place like home, but hotel life has its comforts, episodes of ease and quiet. I’d adapted to the routine, moving like a shark through the murky waters, seeking out a good meal and an elliptical machine, maybe some free weights and a local highlight.

By 9:00 on this particular night, I’d exercised, eaten, washed and folded and repacked a load of laundry, and now read in the hotel lounge, warmed by an electric fireplace. I learned not to spend too much time in the room, supine, half-awake, fat and clickered. A thought came: the hot tub to melt these tired bones, perhaps slide more easily into sleepfulness.

Two men were already soaking in the water. Men like me. Away from home on some job. The younger man said he lived in California, looked about 40. The other was about a decade older — a solid, square-jawed guy bristled with gray, from St. Louis, MO. A sizable man, formerly sturdy, even forbidding, now with a vast distended belly.

St. Louis, I knew, was a baseball town, and in the previous October the Cardinals won the World Series in heart-stopping fashion, so we talked baseball, those cardiac Cards. Sports talk, old glue amongst men, binding us, opening our mouths, a language we shared. I brought up the Steve Jobs biography, said how much I enjoyed reading it, and he said that he was in the middle of it, too.

After ten minutes I rose, ready to leave, but before I could towel off, he climbed out like a great pale bear and produced three cold beers from his personal cooler. He was a bring-your-own-cooler kind of guy, a seasoned traveler, used to making himself at home in anonymous, sterile places.

So he offered me one, here, arm extended, beer tipped a little toward me. Ever have Yuengling? I could hardly refuse. Sat on the ledge this time, submerged in hot water up to my knees. More talk of work and technology and other things. Topics that left me smiling, nodding, a little bored, nearly done. I asked if he had children. Yes, he told me, a boy, 25, and a daughter, 17.

You must be doing the college thing, I said.

No, no, he answered. My daughter has severe cerebral palsy, she was born very small, very early. No, she won’t be going to college.

We talked for a long while about his daughter. He explained her condition, his wife’s difficult pregnancy, the forced bed rest and preeclampsia, the terrible choice he was forced to make. To save a life, to risk a wife or daughter. He said, I live with that decision every day of my life. And he described his daughter’s ability to hear and understand a conversation, but her near-total inability to communicate. I would give my left nut, he said, if she could just tell me that she had to throw up. He told of those occasions when she grew unsettled, distressed — talked of bathing her, of rubbing lotion into her skin, of making her smell clean and good, fresh clothes and baby powder, trying to calm and sooth this troubled creature.

But after two days of that, he said, fussing and fretting and still nothing works, it’s time to pay a visit to the pediatrician.

Was she happy, I asked, could he tell? He said how they loved to go camping, described in detail the whole elaborate set-up — and how she loved to ride on the back of his motorcycle, using the complicated harness system he’d rigged up for those trips. How, also, she liked to turn the pages of magazines and listen to music. The Steve Miller Band was her favorite, no one knew why. So yes he believed she was happy, yes, happy every day.

And a pause now, time moving slow like the smoke that rose from the heated water, and I gave a half-apology at the preposterousness of my next question, which I asked anyway. What has she taught you, this daughter of yours. What have you learned?

He thought it over. Patience, he said, and love. He said how he used to think that love was this or love was the other thing, that love was lust — he made a crude push-pull gesture, in and out with his bent arms — that love was only physical. But he had been mistaken about those things. He said, I learned that love is a quiet river that runs through you, with the power to carve a valley through solid rock.

He said those exact words in a hotel hot tub somewhere in Jersey. We soaked in the echo of that amazing statement. Love is a quiet river, I repeated. That runs through you. With the power, I said, trying to recall the words exact, to carve a valley. Through solid rock. I asked his co-worker, who was now quiet and pensive, if he’d known this about his friend. No, he said, we just met yesterday on the job. And the man from St. Louis, whose name I never did learn, said it’s not something he usually talked about. So I thanked him for that, for telling us about his little girl.